Ready 'N Steady by D.A.,
"Ready 'N Steady", by the group D.A., is the title of a song that appeared on Billboard Magazine's Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart for three weeks in June 1979. The tune, along with any information about it or the artist, has been notoriously hard to find, leading many collectors to consider it a "phantom record". The June 16, 1979 issue of Billboard listed ten songs on its Bubbling Under chart, including "Ready 'N Steady" by D.A. at #106. The record, released by the tiny Rascal Records label, jumped to #103 on June 23, then nosed up to #102 the following week before dropping off the chart -- and into obscurity. No collector is known to have owned, or even seen or heard, the record in the last three decades.Music historian Joel Whitburn, whose company Record Research specializes in analyzing the Billboard charts, has published various books containing chart data. He has collected tens of thousands of hit records, including all of the 45s ever to hit the Hot 100 or Bubbling Under charts -- all except "Ready 'N Steady".In a 1995 interview, Whitburn stated that he believed "Ready N' Steady" did in fact exist, at least at one time, even though he had never actually seen or heard the record. "We think - we think - that it's a girl's rock group from Chicago," Whitburn said. "Punk group, we think - 1979. And we think that the Rascal label was out of a guy's home in Detroit." Whitburn spied a small ad for Rascal Records (complete with a Motor City address) in a punk-rock publication and went to check it out; unfortunately, the building was vacant, with no sign of the label or its only charted record. (The entry in Billboard says "Ready 'N Steady" had a label number of 102; if there was a "Rascal 101" released, it too remains unknown to collectors.)Before his 1995 interview on the subject, some collectors speculated that the record never existed at all, and was in Whitburn's books only as a copyright trap. The researcher has admitted to two such traps (designed to keep others from copying his work): Ralph Marterie's version of "The Song Of Love" is listed as peaked at #84 for the week ending December 26, 1955 (Billboard did not put out an issue that week, and Marterie never recorded this tune); and in his compilation of Billboard's Rock charts, where Whitburn includes the fictitious song "Drag You Down" by the equally non-existent group The Cysterz.The most recent edition of Jerry Osbourne's Official Price Guide to Records (16th Edition, published 2002) lists the record (and a value of $75-125), along with an unnamed album on the Frontline label, dated 1985 or 1986 (almost certainly by another group named "D.A.").In 2005, Whitburn published a "Bubbling Under The Hot 100" chart book, which listed all "Bubblers" from the chart's creation in 1959 through 2004. Under the entry "D.A." it says "the existence of this record and artist is in question", and quotes a price of $150 as its value.Finally, in 2009, Whitburn brought out his newest "Top Pop Singles" book, which includes both Top 100 and Bubbling Under singles -- but D.A. is not listed at all. In an interview with the website CelebrityAccess, Whitburn noted he still has not been able to find "Ready 'N Steady" and flatly says, "I don't think it exists."